


The Fear

by theorangewitch



Series: Angstober [19]
Category: Dungeons & Dragons (Roleplaying Game)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-23
Updated: 2018-10-23
Packaged: 2019-08-06 14:10:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 707
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16389179
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theorangewitch/pseuds/theorangewitch
Summary: So Lolth scared her. But Lolth didn’t scare her nearly as much as what the Krynn Dynasty turned to after it felt it had done all it could with Lolth’s help.





	The Fear

**Author's Note:**

> Angstober Day 23 - Weak. I interpreted this more as cowardice than weakness I guess? Cowardice and fear. Hence the title. Anyway I used Exandria as the setting for this story.
> 
> As usual, the link to the full story is in the author's note of the first work in this series.

Lolth had always scared Ostara Iuno. Ostara’s friend Aspasia, who had in the later years of their life become a high-ranking priestess of the goddess, had laid eyes on her once, in her drow form. 

“She looked like another priestess at first. I thought Chloris was playing a prank on us. Pretending to be the goddess. But then I looked closer and she had four eyes, and each eye had two irises and two pupils.” Aspasia shivered. “It was creepy.”

Creepy was right. Not long after Aspasia’s encounter with Lolth, Aspasia herself was selected to go into the Abyss to run whatever gauntlet Lolth had in store that would allow her priestesses to ascend to the next plane of existence. Whatever that meant. Aspasia didn’t come back. Only she did, and they found her wandering the Underdark as a Drider. Ostara was so horrified by the sight of the woman she’d considered her best friend that she almost let out a blast of magic at her. 

“Don’t kill it,” Chloris ordered. “It must bear out this punishment for its failure for the remainder of its natural life.”

Aspasia’s face haunted her thoughts every hour after that. There was so much pain and terror on her face as she stood there before the women whom she’d considered friends. Ostara never looked at Lolth’s statue in the temple the same way again. 

Not that Ostara had been the most enthusiastic of priestesses beforehand anyhow. Divine magic had always been too wishy-washy for her, and her interests had always been more academic than religious. She preferred the arcane to the the divine. And so, on quiet nights when the rest of her household had entered their states of dreamless meditation, Ostara stayed up and studied. She stole the books from the magical scholars of the other houses, the men who had not been consigned to priestesshood, and she used her family’s considerable wealth to have tomes smuggled down from the surface. 

Divination was her favorite practice. What was the point of magic, she thought, if not to gain more knowledge? Lolth’s practice gave her so little knowledge of the world. The goddess had opinions and allegiances, while magic, plaine, simple, arcane magic, had none of the above. It was neutral. It was controllable. It was safe. And Ostara liked being safe.

Her brother, Nerezzus, made fun of her for this. He enjoyed stalking the tunnels of the Underdark looking for any number of scrapes to get into. 

“C’mon, Ossie,” he goaded her. “You’re barely living, cooped up in your study when you aren’t in the temple.”

“Go fuck yourself, Nez,” she replied, carving runes into polished divining stones. 

So Lolth scared her. But Lolth didn’t scare her nearly as much as what the Krynn Dynasty turned to after it felt it had done all it could with Lolth’s help. Chloris died, and was replaced by a new High Priestess named Ismene. But Ismene wasn’t like Chloris or Aspasia or Ostara or any of the other High Priestesses who had come before her. She bore the banner of a new god, a god that Ostara didn’t entirely understand. She had intense sway over the Empress in a way that frightened many who knew Leylas Krynn before Ismene had shown up. 

And Ostara, terrified by what she didn’t understand of what Ismene called “The Luxen,” fled. She’d accepted her cowardice long ago when she refused to pursue the routes of higher rank that Aspasia did, and never went exploring with Nerezzus, and turned away from the mysterious and holy power that Lolth offered to the weaker, but safer, arcane magic. But she’d never considered fleeing Ghor Dranas, much less Xhorhas. Her family lived there, she’d lived her whole life there. Beyond its borders were people who hated the Krynn Dynasty, hated Xhorhas, hated drow. Beyond its borders was the sun. 

But there came a point where the cultish worship of The Luxen along with the imperialism that this new creature seemed to demand became far more terrifying than the Dwendalian Empire or the surface or the sun. So she crafted herself a  _ hat of disguise _ and became the moon elf Maeve deWight, fleeing into the sun, never to see her family again. 

**Author's Note:**

> Nerezzus, Ostara's brother, also appears in the Critical Role fic that I wrote for Angstober Day 3 (? I think) - Betrayal.


End file.
